Chapter 159

Chapter 159

Chapter 159

High Queen Nephridi curiously watched as the armies of the invading forces began to finally breach Panu’s realm. These world quests always started later than the others due to the extreme difficulty the local forces often had in deterring professional armies of already established factions, even if there were level caps.

Lazily glancing out over the capital city of her homeworld with buildings of eloquent designs sprawling out into the horizon, she picked up an extremely high quality fruit out of a bowl - a blood-variant dao treasure - and began to thoughtfully chew as she used it as a mere snack. Most people would want this kind of luxury for breakthroughs in the lower grades, but she merely enjoyed the taste and gained little to nothing from it.

Perhaps Riven or Allie could have used it?

Nephridi looked back down to the crimson, glistening fruits in a basket nearby, her long white dress hugging her slender body as she lounged on the cushioned bench. Perhaps she’d prepare a gift basket for them when the integration finally ended if they lived that long.

And although both Allie and Riven seemed to be doing wonderfully in their own progressions, that was not the case for Kathrine. Nephridi was half tempted to execute the little royal and her entire family for all the shame and failure she’d brought for such a simple task.

Bring them into the fold Nephridi had said.

Support them in their growth Nephridi had said.

But neither of those two very simple tasks had even come close to fruition. Instead, Riven and Allie had almost shunned the Blood Moon Requiem’s trading outpost entirely - forgoing any training or tutoring in favor of their own pursuits after almost being assassinated. Then things had only gotten worse when those damnable younglings Nephridi had sent failed to interrupt a simple low tier system quest, resulting in Riven being whisked away against his will while Allie raged about how incompetent Kathrine and her ilk were.

It was outright humiliating for Nephridi to watch, because all of this reflected on her. Truthfully it was the first time she’d felt a sensation of ‘embarrassment’ for millenia, as she usually didn’t care what other people thought due to killing anyone she didn’t like - but these were her favorite granddaughter’s children. Nephridi wanted to impress them.

So much for that.

She let out a long sigh and covered her eyes with her right arm. “Oh Sheline, if you’re still out there somewhere - please forgive your grandmother for sending such idiots to help your progeny.”

Raising her arm off her face and lowering her gaze back to the visions over the table, her eyes rested back on Riven. “But perhaps they don’t need my help anyways. Who would have thought... A shard of gluttony, in a newly integrated world?”

High Queen Nephridi snickered at the very idea of it. That snicker turned into an outright guffaw of laughter, and she had to clutch at her gut to stop herself from shaking from the forcefulness of it. “Oh my... How nasty things are going to get with an artifact of that magnitude present. At the very least it should be quite fun to watch! Wouldn’t you agree, Jalel? Speaking of which, I do wonder why you never told me about this. Hadn’t you once described Riven as - and I quote: ‘unimpressive in all regards’?”

The queen’s glare caused her nephew to stiffen, and sweat was already beginning to trickle down his forehead from where he stood ahead of two armored elites that’d escorted him here. They glared at his back with crimson eyes flaring, fists tightening around obsidian longswords.

After there was a pause with no response, Nephridi humphed with amusement and then turned back to eating fruits and watching Riven try to figure out what to do. Watching these two children had become a favorite entertaining pastime for the queen, and she’d forgone many of her responsibilities running the empire in order to do so. “I find it very hard to believe that you intentionally held such an interesting secret from me, Jalel. But although you are not my most competent grandchild - you are not THAT incompetent. You would have known what it was Riven held. Jalel, you have two minutes to explain to me why you tried to hide this, and why I should not execute you and your entire house for treason. You can begin explaining... now.”

***

[Quest Dispensed: Find Your Succubus Princess – You have found and rescued your spider princess Athela, now it’s time to find and rescue Fay. Cultists have taken your minion from you by force with nefarious intent, and it is likely they will eventually kill her if you try to get her back.

Quests aside, you know you don’t have a choice. Find and rescue Fay within 21 days, 4 hours, 5 minutes to avoid catastrophe concerning Fay's wellbeing.]

Riven dismissed the notification almost immediately as it came, scoffing at the mere idea of having a quest for this kind of thing. He needed no quest to urge him into saving her, and anger surged inside him as he thought about what things were likely happening to her even now while sitting here; attempting to solve the riddle of the ritual these cultists had used to escape.

Fuck the 21 days. He’d do it in two.

Beside him Azmoth was contemplating Riven’s recent display of hellfire, trying to gain insights from his master’s use of it to integrate those concepts into a stamina-based martial art rather than Riven’s own spell form. And hunched over in a corner of the stone puzzle-box room, still in a state of shock from the things he’d witnessed only two days ago, was Luke. The old man’s red eyes occasionally blinked, but otherwise he remained as still as a statue while trying to compute the magnitude of violence unleashed by his master.

Luke obviously had far more misgivings about the event than Riven did, because Riven had already tossed the guilt aside. He didn’t have time to feel guilty, and he’d fucking do it again if given the choice.

Closing his eyes, Riven entered a meditative pose while letting his shadow pillar feel out the surrounding remnants of magic used to escape this place. That it was shadow magic he was certain of, and that it was also similar to his own riftwalk spell was also a certainty. He could feel just how the lock-and-key mechanisms these cultists used were similar in shape to his own fractals, the ones on his shadow pillar when he activated riftwalk, only that here in the cube’s alternate reality: the remnant ritual fractals had been brought out into the open with a few key modifications.

They’d been hard to detect at first, but he’d mostly pieced them back together by now.

Mostly.

He’d done a little bit of runecrafting in his attempts to learn totem-making early on, but that was truly the only exposure he’d had up until now. This ritual used something similar, with figurines of ashy trails littering the air about him - invisible to the naked eye but present to his mana sense that resonated with his shadow pillar. Eighteen in total, Riven rearranged them in different patterns and reconnected pieces to one another by manipulating the remnant mana - trying to form a convergence.

The visage of Gluttony’s maw flashed in his mind, letting its presence be known and incorporating itself into his aura but otherwise leaving him be... interested in the proceedings as he struggled to grasp the secrets of shadow.

“This ritual is... strange.” Riven stated from his cross-legged position in the air, completely focused on the task at hand while sigils interchanged and the air about him shifted with passing dao fields interlocking between them for every miniscule alteration he created. His fingers steepled together in thought, and spear-staff laid across his lap, Riven pondered what it was he had wrong. “It is almost as if they created a wormhole without using a source of intent. My understanding of mana and spellcasting was that intent was a necessary piece, a fundamental part to any direction you wanted to take. Is this not the case?”

Riven curiously glanced over at the old elf thrall, and Luke blinked a couple of times to set himself out of the stupor he’d been in.

“Sorry... Can you say that again?”

Riven frowned, but repeated the query as asked.

Luke thought for a bit, then shook his head. “You are correct in assuming that spellcasting needs intent. But for a ritual, they have none. Rituals are outside the realm of will, and function on a more mechanical nature. An example of this would be an archer. The archer can initially direct the arrow by aiming it and imbuing it with power by drawing it back, but as soon as the arrow is loosed it no longer contains the intent of the archer and can be manipulated by external forces like distance, wind, and gravity.”

“You’re essentially saying that this ritual was pre-set?”

“That’s correct. All rituals are.”

“Wouldn’t that mean that they needed a pre-disclosed location to teleport to?”

“That would also be correct.”

“I see.” Riven’s gaze shifted back to the black motes of mana he could feel in his mana field. He inspected every one of the sigils bit by bit, looking for the difference in mana signatures that would be a telltale sign.

And he found it.

One of the sigils had a mana signature that was older than the others. Theoretically, this would be because the mana had been dispensed and cast at an earlier time than the newer signatures. When the opposite end of the ritual linked, some of that older mana would seep over to this side, depositing itself in a very small swap of space that was a signature requirement of his own riftwalk. Prying the sigil open to expect it in more rigorous detail, Riven eventually grinned with a malicious sneer.

The cultist across the table from him became distracted for a moment when the succubus they’d abducted began to sob even louder. “SHUT THAT DUMB BITCH UP! God! I’m so tired of hearing you two-”

Kenji felt the pulse and immediately teleported out right after grabbing the sack as a blast of malicious hunger roared to life over the ritual circle’s center. Then he teleported again, and again and again, before running out of mana and beginning to run as fast as he could from the terrifying presence he’d left miles behind.

***

Riven stepped through the black portal with Jackal in hand, streams of blood flowing all along the blade and shaft before burrowing into his own body as if the weapon was a part of his arm.

His foot seemed to echo as it touched down onto a stone floor, and time seemed to freeze as he took in his surroundings. A large minotaur to his right, a kneeling hooded man entranced in meditation directly in front of him, and a woman sitting with an expression of disbelieving shock at a round table in the middle of the room. A humanoid cthulu demon dressed in purple robes slowly rose from a sitting position on a dresser nearby, evaluating the turn of events with more curiosity than anything else - and then finally to his left: he saw it.

Riven just stared, at a loss for words as the blonde man standing near Fay with pliers in hand just gawked at him with mounting horror. Riven felt his facial muscles twitch with a flurry of emotions that were soon overcome by just one, and his aura blasted the room around them to flood the underground lair with a landslide of cold fury.

“We meet again so soon...”

Riven’s body erupted with Blessing of the Crow - encompassing him in wisps of red speckled with black’ and his armored foot kicked the meditating man straight into the jaw.

The man’s head exploded from the impact and his body was sent flying in a spray of blood.

The woman screamed in a panic and both her minions went to protect her - the minotaur charging with horns down and the cthulhu man beginning to cast arcane spells of some kind that glowed a deep purple amidst flourishing hand gestures.

Riven blurred, engaging with a stance taught to him by Luke only two months ago before cleaving right through the minotaur with a sidestep. Simultaneously storm balls exploded from around him to crash into both the cthulhu man and the woman who’d begun to stagger back from the table.

All three were left as mutilated puddles of gore within seconds.

To his left the blonde man had tried to summon a portal to escape, but just as the portal began to open up - Riven’s cold, gluttonous aura clamped down hard.

The portal only halfway opened, not being nearly big enough for the cultist to run into, but he tried nevertheless. Screaming profanities and abandoning Fay entirely, he pushed to force himself through the tiny rift without success.

Riven blipped forward, still clamping down and suppressing the other man’s mana effortlessly. It was like an elephant stepping on a bumble bee when comparing the sheer quantities of power between the two casters, and Riven’s armored gauntlet slammed onto the man’s shoulder - yanking him out and flinging him like a comet into the opposite wall.

*CRUNCH*

The cultist screamed, his left rib cage snapping like a series of twigs while his left shoulder and arm flattened against the stone. Bouncing off the wall with an obvious concussion, the man stumbled forward and began vomiting blood from the internal hemorrhagic bleeding he was experiencing.

Only to be picked up and bodily slammed onto the large oak table face-first.

Conjuring black needle-like snares, Riven yanked his broken arm and fastened it to the thick wood. The man underneath him whimpered loudly and then screamed again with an unintelligible plea when Riven’ crushed his other wrist and fastened it to the table’s opposite side.

Riven stared at the sobbing villain, hunkering down into a squatting position to be eye-level with the broken and violently coughing cultist who was no doubt about to go into shock over blood loss. Yanking the target's chin up to look back at him, Riven snarled out the last words this man would ever hear. “Seems like you’re dying too fast for me to keep my earlier promises on how you’d go, so this will have to do instead."

Smashing the man’s bloodied face into the table again, Riven hoisted his spear up and came back around. Aiming directly for the man’s backside, Riven drew back his weapon and speared the cultist directly through the rear.

The weapon easily cut all the way through the thick table’s wood and into the stone floor below as the man shrieked like a hyena, but he was too weak to do anything other than lift his head in that garbled wail and slightly tug at the flesh-eating nets bindings his broken wrists to the wood.

Violently kicking the dying man for good measure, snapping one knee at a backwards angle while the cultist went into shock, Riven ignored the various artifacts and expensive baubles around the room. He only cared for one thing.

And surprisingly when he did pass the quest items by, his own worn Chalgathi artifacts detached themselves. They drifted off his body and floated over to intermix with the other set pieces - connecting with them and forming a chrysalis of mana that quickly created a ball of impenetrable, swirling multi-colored light.

Riven continued in stride, his armor still mostly intact, and eventually came to settle down next to the weeping woman he’d come to know over the past months. Her eyes were swollen shut, unable to see him like they were, and her body was absolutely broken. Bruises covered her, a brand was burned into her right lower back, she was bleeding from numerous small cuts that’d no doubt been intended as torture, and her wings were cut off and sealed shut at the stumps with fire.

He extended a hand, hesitating halfway to her when he heard her breathing pick up in fear.

“...Ri... Riven...?” Fay asked with a shaky voice, tears still dripping down her bruised sky-blue skin.

There was a long pause as he tried to figure out how to approach her. How could he face her like this? Would she hate him for not protecting her?

Tears welled up underneath his own eyes, and he nodded with a sniffle - but his voice remained strong . “Yeah. It’s me. I’m so, so sorry-”

“WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Fay began to sob again as she almost threw herself off the bed trying to get to him - still hogtied with metal chains, only missing and almost toppling onto the floor before she was caught.

She continued to bawl as he picked her up and held her, using strings of mana to get rid of the chains binding her; the anti-demon metal snapping, crackling and popping as he angrily destroyed them with a mental lurch of power.

The chains dissolved, and she threw her trembling arms around him and buried her face in his chest, specifically in the pocket where his maw had used to be between the parts of metal breastplate that’d been modified for the amulet.

Azmoth and Luke had stepped through the portal as well, and they watched in silence as Fay uncontrollably cried, shook, and clung to Riven like a castaway holding onto a piece of driftwood.

Riven didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. Choking up and holding her tightly, he just let her sob for as long as she needed to - but motioned for Azmoth to bring over a healing potion in the meantime. Azmoth did as asked and set two of them down on the nightstand next to the small bed, then bent down with another motion from Riven.

"Take that man stapled to the table out into the hallway. Keep him on the edge of life and death with potions, make sure he feels pain." Riven whispered into Azmoth's ear, nodding to the cultist going into shock not far off as Fay loudly sobbed. "If you're able, if he accidentally dies don't worry about it - but I want his death to be drawn out and agonizing."

Azmoth smiled wickedly, nodded, and then stepped away to pick the speared man and table alike. Carrying it out of the room and into an adjacent hallway with Luke to give Riven and Fay their privacy - the door shut with a thud behind them.

Eventually, after many minutes of this, Fay had only somewhat calmed down. But it was still enough to whisper to him in a muffled croak. “You found me! I can’t... I can’t believe you found me...”

Her fingers curled around the back of his neck, and he took this moment of clarity to open her lips and pour a potion down her throat. Making her drink the second one in quick succession, he saw her wounds slowly begin to heal.

“Yeah. I found you.” Riven let out a wavering sigh of his own, settling down into a more comfortable position and knowing she wouldn’t be letting go any time soon. “I know that you’re hurt, but things are going to be ok now. Take as much time as you need... and we’ll talk when you’re ready.”

Still keeping her eyes closed, sniffling, and nodding with quivering lips, she curled up into a ball beside him on the bed. Violently shaking she stayed there for hours, neither of them saying a word, until she finally felt safe enough to let herself go. She passed out from sheer exhaustion after that, still clinging to Riven’s body with a vice-grip, and soon thereafter the violent shaking of the traumatized succubus slowed to a halt.